


Life Was Motion

by ooinugirloo



Category: Star Trek
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 21:07:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ooinugirloo/pseuds/ooinugirloo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is beautiful, she is shining, she is unparalleled. She could read your lips, but she doesn't have to. She reads every line of your body. She's the best damn communications officer in the 'fleet, and this is where she started.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life Was Motion

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic, if I remember correctly, just after the 2009 reboot Star Trek came out, as an ode to Uhura. I felt then, and I still feel, that Abrams has not done this badass queen any justice at all, and this was my attempt to correct that.

Life was motion, and motion was communication. She learned that before she learned how to speak, or listen. She learned many things before she learned to speak, though. Like how to read people from just a glance, or from hearing someone’s tone of voice. She learned to _see_ , and to _hear_. And though many can hear, few can really listen. Unfortunately, (luckily? She can never tell.) she can. 

She grew up with _kimya kingi kina mshindo mkubwa_ , but didn’t know what to call it until her Bibi told her what it was called in the other language; _a long silence followed by a mighty noise._ For her, it was just life. She had to learn to read the silences to predict the noise, and then tune out the roar and listen to the dying whine underneath. She had to know when to hide and when to distract him from her sisters. She had to know when he was out, and for how long. She had to know how much time she would have before it would all start again. It was all she knew, listen, interpret, repeat. She knew when her sisters were sad and scared and about to cry. She knew how to tell them _“Baada ya dhiki faraja”_ and _“Baba wa kambo si baba”_ silently, with just her arms and her heart whispering straight to theirs. She knew she could never leave, could never abandon them. But when the roar had subsided for a while, she would go to her Bibi’s hut and learn, learn, learn all she could about the outside. Her Bibi was small and wrinkled, and smelled of herbs and soil. She was very curious in her youth, which made her very wise in her age. She knew the _other_ language; the one taught in the big schools that both of them had seen only from afar. She learned it from listening, and was now teaching it to her. She loved her Bibi who didn’t laugh at her dreams and her longing for the other places. She loved her Bibi who taught her the _other_ words to say to her sisters when they were scared: _“After hardship comes relief”_ and _“A step-father is not a father.”_

She never knew how it happened, exactly. Maybe there was a god after all. One day, he just didn’t come back. She was a young woman, then. Her mother came back to life. Her sisters lost the haunted, hunted look in their eyes. She smiled for the first time in a long while. She sang as she worked. There was no one to stop her. _Freedom_. A word her Bibi had taught her, but that she never understood until then. Life went back to how it should have been, and if she had to work a little harder than the other girls her age, what was that compared to being _free_? Her gentle hands grew callused, her shapely legs gained muscle, and she browned a bit more in the sun. But she sang as she worked, and was happy for a time. But then came the day when her Bibi taught her all that she knew. The day when her Bibi peered at her with timeless, liquid, black eyes and said in her wind-through-the-brush voice: _“This is not the place for you, child.”_ She protested, but her Bibi would not be swayed. “ _We will be fine, this is our place. But you, you were always meant for the stars._ _Ukitaka kujifunza, mwishowe utashinda, ukichoka hupotea_. _Go, child.”_ She blinked her tears from her eyes as she hugged her mother and sisters, whispering _“I love you. I’m sorry.”_ with her heart and hearing their hearts whispering back _“We know, we love you too. Thank you. Be happy.”_ As she walked away from the village she had known her entire life, towards the big school that she’d only ever seen from afar she heard her Bibi’s voice in her head and wiped her tears away. _“If you want to learn something you will succeed in the end, but if you give up, you will lose.”_

The big school was like her village, except louder and brighter and fast, fast, fast. She had always been intelligent, so she picked up numbers and letters quickly, moving though the levels with determination and pride. She graduated from that school, and went to a better one in a different country. She was fluent in the several _other_ languages, and devoured all information given to her. She learned and learned and learned until she was bursting with knowledge, and pride, and the urge to go, go, go. Out of her country first, then off of her world. This planet was too small for her.  After completing her lower education she knew there was only one place that would allow her to do what she needed to do. She needed to go to the stars.

She was a woman now, and she was beautiful. (She knew it from all of the things she could see and hear, the stuttering, the increased heart rates, the averted eyes, the sweating, and of course, the mostly awful attempts at courtship.) She was at one of this planet’s most prestigious institutions, on track to go to the stars after her graduation. (She knew it from the way the professors looked at her, assessing, and how they dropped comments about starships and five-year missions.) She was very intelligent, the top of her class. (She knew it from the proud looks of her teachers and the jealous looks of her classmates) But sometimes, she knew too much. They didn’t need to speak to her, or even look at her. She could read their feelings in the set of their shoulders, their worries in the creases in their brows. It was sometimes overwhelming.

Dancing was just like speaking, to her. That’s why she would go to these clubs with their alternation of blinding lights and absolute darkness (so she couldn’t see their faces and how their eyebrows would come together and how their lips would thin and how the vein in their neck would throb and a million other things she could read like words) and their eardrum-shattering music (so she couldn’t hear their words and how they stuttered or slurred or inflected or paused or a million other things she could listen to like a conversation) and their crush of nameless bodies (so she couldn’t see how they gestured and twitched and leaned and a million other things she could feel like caresses). She would come to lose herself. She would come to test herself. She closed her eyes and moved. Moving was as natural to her as speaking and hearing, ingrained just as deeply. She came to disappear and to just be. To numb the constant flow of information she got every second of every day without even wanting it or trying to get it. _He/she/they  liked/hated/wanted  it/that/nothing/everything_. Her Bibi always said, _“Kinywa ni jumba la maneno.”, the mouth is the home of words,_ but she knows things that her Bibi didn’t. She knows that people don’t need words. She also knows that the things that people actually want to say, they rarely say with their mouths.

He was that personified. He was bright and brash and obvious and a _lie_. He smiled when he wanted to cry, laughed when he wanted to scream. But he wasn’t all contradictions; that would’ve been too easy. He flirted when he wanted intelligent conversation. He picked fights he couldn’t win when he wanted to repent, and always, always, always, fought for the helpless. He was smart, so he hid it behind a grinning mask. Strategic, so he rushed in headfirst without a thought. She didn’t know that at first, though. She thought he was as dumb as the rest. But he annoyed her, so she watched him, and she learned. That’s probably why she _saw_ , as she always seemed to, when no one else did.

Motion was as eloquent as anything else to her. Dancing isn’t the only motion that reveals something about a person, fighting does too. Most people can’t tell, but she had lots of practice reading the silent messages. More practice than anyone should really ever have, she sometimes mused to herself when she was feeling maudlin. She saw the _this makes me feel alive, why does this make me feel alive_ , and the _I hate myself_ , and the _I’m done_ , and the _this is all I can do_. She saw it written on his bloodied fists, painted in bruises across his chest, screamed from his grimly satisfied, self-loathing eyes.

She doesn’t understand him, and he makes her angry. She can read him, sometimes, but she doesn’t know if what she sees is another illusion (he seems to have an unlimited number of masks behind which he hides,) or his real self. This frustrates her. She can see him, but he doesn’t let himself be _seen_. It reminds her of herself. She hates him, a little. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t hate him more.

When she is sitting in the audience at the hearing, she wants to be completely on her favorite professor/good friend/love interest’s side, but there’s this little voice in the back of her head sympathizing with him, the idiot. Mysteriously, it sounds a lot like her Bibi: _But if you give up, you will lose._ Then the distress call comes through, and all thoughts of him, the man of many masks, are pushed aside as all hell breaks loose.

She _sees_ him in the belly of the ship and on the Bridge, she is sure of it. He has no mask left to hide him, he’s all desperation and tightly leashed panic, determined to be heard, determined to _make himself heard_ , at any and all cost. In fact, it almost is at all costs when he is jettisoned from the ship like so much unwanted trash. She feels a twinge in her chest, and squelches it, determined to not feel pity (was is pity? She’s not entirely sure—maybe sympathy? In any case, she isn’t really inclined to analyze it.) for he who brought it all on himself. Then when everything seems most bleak _of course_ he finds some completely impossible way to come back; dripping wet, clothes torn, hands trembling, and instantly ready with a lying, cocky smile and fabricated witty rejoinder.  She barely had time to roll her eyes before insults, and then fists were flying, and once that happened, she barely even allowed herself to blink.

That’s probably why she saw what no one else did. (She often saw what no one else did, but this time there were lots of people watching. _Watching_ and _seeing_ are two different things, she knows, but she still thinks that she was the only one who saw it.) She saw underneath the anger and the fear and the cockiness and the lies on the surface. She saw the _I’m alone_ , and the _I can’t_ , and the _I have to_ , and the _I’m sorry_. She read the heartbreak in his punches, the sympathy in his blocks. They were similar, she noticed in that moment. Two beings so opposite that people couldn’t conceive of them having a single thing common were, at the heart of it, the same. He was a liar because he had been hurt too much. His masks protected him. Show everyone what they want to see, and they won’t bother to look underneath. And on the other hand, _he_ showed everyone only what he wanted them to see. In his case, this was nothing. People accepted it, though, because he was _different_ from them, and people don’t often like to spend very much time thinking about things that are different from them. It was him, the immutable object, versus him, the ever-changing wisp of mercury. Two completely different approaches that accomplish the same thing. But now both of them were completely shattered, baring all. He had abandoned all pretense of masks, the stakes were too high. And he had been pushed beyond all reason, shoved off of a precipice, hurtling down into rage and despair. That was the beginning of the end. For the first time, she could read him like an open book. But the focus of his attentions right now was not her. Unfortunately, (luckily? She really couldn’t have taken that punch.) his emotions would never be hers to see.

That’s what attracted her to him in the first place. He spoke volumes with his eyes, his hands, the set of his shoulders. He didn’t mean to, though, and he hated that he couldn’t control it. He loved control, more than she could understand. But she did understand, more than many people, why losing control was dangerous. It just wasn’t the right thing to love, she thought. That’s why they couldn’t love each other. She didn’t need speech, but she needed signs. He was disinclined to produce either. That’s why after it was all over, when his Lady was docked and being lovingly pieced back together, when they all had time to think and breathe and see and listen instead of just _running, running, running_ , she decided to set him free. She could read how relieved he was when they went back to being friends in the lack of tension around his eyes when they talked. She was happy he was happy. Anyway, she was used to being alone.  As her Bibi would say: _“Anipendaye nami nampenda: anikataaye, napunguwa simanzi.” The one who loves me, I also love; one who rejects me diminishes my grief._ As he would say: _Kaiidth. What is, is._ She will not be alone for long. Even if another person doesn’t manage to catch her attention, she will soon be where she always longed to be. She will be among her stars, shining, proud, and beautiful.

Sitting on the grass outside, letting the breeze ruffle her hair, listening to the soft sounds of the earth and the hum of people nearby, she felt at peace. She was back on the ground, taking in all of the things that would’ve been lost if they had been just a few minutes too late, if she had been a minute too slow on a translation, if he had been a minute slower in returning with the Scotsman, if he had been a minute slower in regaining control and had killed him, _if if if_ , a thousand things that didn’t happen, that would’ve changed the future. She was a part of that, she helped save her planet. If she wasn’t on that bridge, if she couldn’t distinguish _one_ from the _other_ , if she had never left her country, if she had never learned the _other_ languages, who knows what would have happened to her Earth. It was like her Bibi always said to her: _Huwezi kujua ukiwezacho mpaka umejaribu. You cannot know what you can do until you have tried._


End file.
